DJT filed a motion to get D.C. federal judge Tanya Chutkan off his case in hopes of getting a friendlier judge. Chutkan rejected the recusal motion and is staying on his case. That's solidly good news.
I. BACKGROUND
Before the court is Defendant’s Motion for Recusal of District Judge Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 455(a). ECF No. 50 (“Motion”).
For the reasons set forth below, recusal is not warranted in this case and the court will DENY the Motion.
II. LEGAL STANDARD
A “judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” 28 U.S.C. § 455(a). As Defendant has done here, a litigant may move for a judge’s recusal under that provision. See S.E.C. v. Loving Spirit Found. Inc., 392 F.3d 486, 493 (D.C. Cir. 2004). “[T]he moving party must demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that a judge has conducted himself in a manner supporting disqualification.” United States v. Nixon, 267 F. Supp. 3d 140, 147 (D.D.C. 2017).
But justice also demands that judges not recuse without cause. “In the wrong hands, a disqualification motion is a procedural weapon to harass opponents and delay proceedings. If supported only by rumor, speculation, or innuendo, it is also a means to tarnish the reputation of a federal judge.” Microsoft Corp., 253 F.3d at 108. Motions for recusal could also be wrongfully deployed as a form of “judge shopping,” Alberti v. Gen. Motors Corp., 600 F. Supp. 1024, 1025 (D.D.C. 1984), permitting “litigants or third parties to exercise a negative veto over the assignment of judges,” In re United States, 666 F.2d 690, 694 (1st Cir. 1981). There is, accordingly, as much “obligation upon a judge not to recuse himself when there is no occasion as there is for him to do so when there is.” United States v. Mitchell, 377 F. Supp. 1312, 1325 (D.D.C. 1974) (quotation omitted), aff’d sub nom. United States v. Haldeman, 559 F.2d 31 (D.C. Cir. 1976) (en banc), cert. denied sub nom. Ehrlichman v. U.S., 431 U.S. 933, 97 (1977), reh’g denied sub nom. Mitchell v. United States, 433 U.S. 916 (1977).
III. DISCUSSION
A. Source of statements
The statements at issue here were based on intrajudicial sources.* They arose not, as the defense speculates, from watching the news, Reply in Supp. of Mot. for Recusal, ECF No. 58 at 4 (“Reply”), but from the sentencing proceedings in United States v. Palmer .... [see, crooked DJT lied about where the statements came from and his crooked attorneys lied too] The statements directly reflected facts proffered and arguments made by those defendants. And the court specifically identified the intrajudicial sources that informed its statements.
* The statements DJT refer to are from prosecution of two of the 1/6 traitors who participated in DJT's 1/6 coup attempt. In those cases Chutkan commented in court (not to the press or media) about the possible liability of people who had not yet been charged in the 1/6 insurrection. DJT argues that those statements prove by clear & convincing evidence that she is biased against Trump.
Even if the statements at issue lacked an intrajudicial foundation, however, they would not provide a reasonable basis to question the court’s impartiality from “the perspective of a fully informed third-party observer who understands all the relevant facts and has examined the record and the law.” Cordova, 806 F.3d at 1092 (internal quotation marks omitted). And the statements certainly do not manifest a deep-seated prejudice that would make fair judgment impossible—the standard for recusal based on statements with intrajudicial origins.
At the outset, it bears noting that the court has never taken the position the defense ascribes to it: that former “President Trump should be prosecuted and imprisoned.” [again, crooked DJT is lying to the court]Motion at 1. And the defense does not cite any instance of the court ever uttering those words or anything similar. Instead, the defense interprets the court’s verbal reiteration of Palmer and Priola’s arguments about their relative culpability as “suggest[ing]” a secret “core view” about Defendant’s criminality.
Even on their face, the court’s statements fall short of manifesting “clear and convincing evidence”** that the court has conducted itself “in a manner supporting disqualification.”
** The three main evidence standards are (i) preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not) used to find liability in civil lawsuits, (ii) clear and convincing evidence (more than a preponderance of evidence but less than beyond a reasonable doubt) used for proof of fraud and in some other situations like this one, and (iii) evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, needed for criminal guilt.
IV. CONCLUSION
For these reasons, Defendant’s Motion for Recusal of District Judge Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 455(a), ECF No. 50, is hereby DENIED.
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
The Huffpo writes about Milley: "
Mark Milley Taking ‘Safety Precautions’ After Trump Suggested He Deserves Execution. After the ex-president accused him of treason, the outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman said he 'will never turn my back on the Constitution.'"
Milley is acting to protect himself and his family to try to prevent some deranged, enraged MAGA maggot with a gun from killing him or is family. That's what authoritarian radical right Republican politics has degenerated into. DJT always was and still is a vicious, authoritarian radical right demagogue.
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
A WaPo opinion comments about rich people cheating on their taxes and the ARRRP (authoritarian radical right Repub Party) staunchly supporting massive tax cheating:
Republicans have been amplifying the claim lately that their party has undergone a “populist” makeover, rendering it both anti-elite and pro-working class. One way Republicans purport to illustrate this
is by attacking President Biden’s expanded funding for the Internal Revenue Service, insisting that it empowers a strike force of bureaucrats to prey on ordinary Americans.
But new data on tax avoidance by the ultrarich badly undermines GOP claims to being an anti-elite, pro-worker party. It shows that if Republicans get their way with regard to the IRS, a nontrivial number of very rich Americans would continue to underpay taxes they owe, effectively making out like bandits — some literally so.
.... the 2,000 people who represent the highest-income non-filers in one or more of those years owe a total of more than $900 million in federal taxes, the data shows.
“These are people who essentially blow raspberries at the IRS,” Wyden told me. “They’re sophisticated people. They know this is wrong, wrong, wrong. And they do it anyway.”
The data underscores that when the IRS is underfunded, wealthy tax cheats benefit in a big way. An underfunded IRS is what Republicans are advocating for.
Starving the IRS has been a longtime Republican project. Indeed, GOP efforts to cut agency funding had some success in creating precisely the state of affairs that Wyden’s data illustrates.
The ARRRP openly supports wealthy tax cheats because it hates government and non-rich people. The irony is that it claims to be anti-elite and pro-working class while it's actually pro-elite and anti-working class (and anti-environment, anti-climate science, anti-abortion, anti-inconvenient truth, bigoted, racist, kleptocratic, etc.). That's the staggering power of MAGA dark free speech for 'ya.
Note, that most salaried and hourly people can't cheat much on their taxes. Taxes are withheld and for the most part that's that. But rich people? They have all kinds of ways to lie, cheat and steal. Wealthy cheaters is what the ARRRP staunchly supports, not the little people.
The 400 wealthiest U.S. families paid an average income tax rate of 8.2% from 2010 to 2018, while others looked like this:
